Precision Medicine and Coinstar Machines

First of all, thanks for all the love on my last post. Being part of the MBCproject team has been an awesome experience even in the first few months, and I promise I’ll update on some of the details soon! But I also wanted to share another cool project that I’ve been a part of over the summer.

I started working with Cure Forward, which is basically a matching service to help cancer patients find clinical trials based on the DNA profiles of their tumors. Though I hadn’t heard about the company before I was approached to be part of their Precision Medicine Advocates team, I knew the patient advocate who would be leading the team, so I looked into it a bit more. It was one of the private companies specifically listed in Vice President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot to help make finding a clinical trial easier, and I love the fact that they are willing to work with patient advocates to make sure that everything they do remains focused on delivering the best care to patients in the easiest way possible.

I’ve written a few things for them, and my first post went live last week. As I tried to explore what precision medicine means to me– and why it’s exciting but not the silver bullet for all of the cancers ever (right now, at least!)– I was left with the image of a Coinstar Machine in my head. That’s sort of how we do cancer care now– dump all the patients in a sorting machine and they end up in categories that determine their treatment. Head on over to my post at Cure Forward if you want to see why I think Precision Medicine is an improvement on good-old coin counting!

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Published by Jamie

A breast cancer researcher turned stay at home mom turned breast cancer patient, I'm navigating my way through cancer treatments and my quest for normalcy in its aftermath. Sometimes normal is hard, and sometimes it's as simple as going for a run, throwing on some lipstick, and heading out to chemo. Follow along at runlipstickchemo.com
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